composed of scientists and engineers, this group disproportionately creates jobs for the other 96 percent.²

When scientists discovered how to decipher the human genome it opened entire new opportunities in many fields including medicine. Similarly, when scientists and engineers discovered how to increase the capacity of integrated circuits by a factor of one million as they have in the past forty years, it enabled entrepreneurs to replace tape recorders with iPods, maps with GPS, pay phones with cell phones, two-dimensional X-rays with three-dimensional CT scans, paperbacks with electronic books, slide rules with computers, and much, much more.³ Further, the pace of creation of new knowledge appears by almost all measures to be accelerating.⁴

Importantly, leverage is at work here. It is not simply the scientist, engineer and entrepreneur who benefit from progress in the laboratory or design center; it is also the factory worker who builds items such as those cited above, the advertiser who promotes them, the truck driver who delivers them, the salesperson who sells them, and the maintenance person who repairs them—not to mention the benefits realized by the user. Further, each job directly created in the chain of manufacturing activity generates, on average, another 2.5 jobs in such unrelated endeavors as operating restaurants, grocery stores, barber shops, filling stations and banks.⁵ Progress enabling products such as those mentioned above in the information fields is built upon the work of a few individuals who decades ago were investigating something called solid state physics—none of whom probably ever thought about CT scans, GPS or iPods—the latter of which can enable one to hold 160,000 books in one’s pocket—any more than one today can predict the breakthroughs a half century hence.⁶